Occult Horror

"It is fitting that I'm beginning a new notebook up here. New surroundings and new ideas, a new beginning. Fresh air." This passage is from the first entry of a journal kept by the narrator of Daniel Kehlmann's spellbinding new novel. It is the record of the seven days that he, his wife, and his four-year-old daughter spend in a house they have rented in the mountains of Germany - a house that thwarts the expectations of the narrator's recollection and seems to defy the very laws of physics.

In an abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, a young man, David Martin, makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he has taken refuge in the world of books and spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city's underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house lie photographs and letters hinting at the mysterious death of the previous owner.

You wouldn’t think events happening years apart, at points in the solar system hundreds of millions of miles distant, would have anything to do with each other. When she was six, Daphne was taken into a neighbor’s tool shed and came within seconds of never coming out alive. Most of the scars healed. Except for the one that went all the way through. You wouldn’t think that the serial murders of children and the one who got away would have any connection with the strange fate of one of Jupiter’s moons.

After a tragedy too painful to bear, former novelist Lily Albrecht has resigned herself to a dull, sexless life as a rare-book dealer—until she gets a lead on a book that just might turn everything around. The Book of the Most Precious Substance is a 17th-century manual on sex magic, rumored to be the most powerful occult book ever written—if it really exists at all. And some of the wealthiest people in the world are willing to pay Lily a fortune to find it, if she can.

It is the spring of 1895, and more than a decade of combating eldritch entities has cost Dr. John Watson his beloved wife Mary, and has nearly broken the health of Sherlock Holmes. Yet the companions do not hesitate when they are called to the infamous Bedlam lunatic asylum, where they find an inmate speaking in R’lyehian, the language of the Old Ones. Moreover, the man is horribly scarred and has no memory of who he is. The detectives discover that he was once a scientist, a student of Miskatonic University, and one of two survivors of a doomed voyage down the Miskatonic River.

A long-buried family secret has come back to haunt Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast. It begins with murder. One of Pendergast's most implacable, most feared enemies is found on his doorstep, dead. Pendergast has no idea who is responsible for the killing, or why the body was brought to his home. The mystery has all the hallmarks of the perfect crime, save for an enigmatic clue: a piece of turquoise lodged in the stomach of the deceased. The gem leads Pendergast to an abandoned mine on the shore of California's Salton Sea.

After a harrowing otherworldly confrontation on the shores of Exmouth, Massachussetts, Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast is missing, presumed dead. Sick with grief, Pendergast's ward, Constance, retreats to her chambers beneath the family mansion at 891 Riverside Drive - only to be taken captive by a shadowy figure from the past. Proctor, Pendergast's longtime bodyguard, springs to action, chasing Constance's kidnapper through cities, across oceans, and into wastelands unknown....

Benton Bertrand is a banshee, cursed with the ability to sense death. Every time he sleeps, he becomes a trapped passenger within a murderer’s skin: able to hear, see, and feel every part of their kill. No matter how hard he tries, it always ends the same way - with death.

Connie's mother asks her to sell an abandoned house once owned by her grandmother in Salem, Mass. Relunctantly, Connie moves to the small town and inhabits the crumbling, ancient house, trying to restore it to a semblance of order. Curious things start to happen when Connie finds the name "Deliverance Dane" on a yellowed scrap of paper and begins to have visions of a long ago woman condemned for practicing "physick," or herbal healing, on her neighbors in 1690s Salem.

The details of the crime scene are no coincidence. The body — a promising starlet — has been battered, bloodied and then discarded between two of Manhattan’s oldest graveyards. One look and Detective Jude Crosby recognizes the tableau: a re-creation of Jack the Ripper’s gruesome work. But he also sees something beyond the actions of a mere copycat. Something more dangerous...and unexplainable.

"Okay, so cats don't always land on their feet. I know that better than most. Since rejoining the Pride, I've made big decisions and even bigger mistakes: the kind paid for with innocent lives. As the first and only female enforcer, I have plenty to prove to my father, the Pride, and myself."

In order to save his friend's life, Wyr sentinel Rune Ainissesthai made a bargain with Vampyre Queen Carling - without knowing what she would ask from him in return. But when Rune attempts to make good on his debt, he finds a woman on the edge.

Freya Beauchamp has been kidnapped and sucked into the past, forced to relive the horrors of Salem and return to the witch-burning hysteria that gripped the small Massachusetts town. Freya's family is determined to save her, but the Passages of Time are closed to the Beauchamp family, leaving them stuck in the present. Joanna, Freddie, and Ingrid must find another way back to save Freya before it's too late. Because this time, when Freya is hanged, she's not coming back...ever.

Fellside is a maximum security prison on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors. It's not the kind of place you'd want to end up. But it's where Jess Moulson could be spending the rest of her life.

Karyn and her husband Roy had come to the peaceful California village of Drago to escape the savagery of the city. On the surface, Drago appeared to be like most small rural towns. But it was not. The village had a most unsavory history. Unexplained disappearances, sudden deaths. People just vanished, never to be found.

Valroy will let nothing block his path to the Unseelie Crown. He is willing to stop at nothing to see both Tir n’Aill and Earth as his dominion, and he'll crush the self-righteous Seelie beneath his bootheels. He had wished for Abigail to stand beside him as his queen, but that went terribly wrong when she chose death over becoming his bride. It was a setback, certainly, but not one he could not overcome. Yet despite being wrenched from the song of life, Abigail returns to Tir n’Aill, only to be hunted by both Seelie and Unseelie alike.

Norman Mailer's dazzlingly rich, deeply evocative novel of ancient Egypt breathes life into the figures of a lost era: the eighteenth-dynasty Pharaoh Rameses and his wife, Queen Nefertiti; Menenhetet, their creature, lover, and victim; and the gods and mortals that surround them in intimate and telepathic communion. Mailer's reincarnated protagonist is carried through the exquisite gardens of the royal harem, along the majestic flow of the Nile, and into the terrifying clash of battle.

I’ve spent my whole life seeing monsters, but they could never see me back...until now. Turns out, I’m not crazy like I’ve spent my whole life believing. Too bad it took being locked in a cage and tortured almost to the point of insanity to realize that. But I’m not alone. In a cage to my left, there’s a monster who’s given up hope. He stays in the shadows and moves with chains wrapped around him, but his golden eyes watch. To my right, there’s a girl with purple wings and familiar gray eyes.

The new vicar had never wanted a picture-postcard parish - or a huge and haunted vicarage. Nor had she wanted to walk into a dispute over a controversial play about a 17th-century clergyman accused of witchcraft...a story that certain long-established families would rather remained obscure. But this is Ledwardine, steeped in cider and secrets...a paradise of cobbled streets and timber-framed houses. And also - as Merrily Watkins and her teenage daughter, Jane, discover - a village where horrific murder is a tradition that spans centuries.

Collette LeSange is a lonely artist who heads an elite fine arts school for children in upstate New York. Her youthful beauty masks the dark truth of her life: she has endured centuries of turmoil and heartache in the wake of her grandfather’s long-ago decision to make her immortal like himself. Now in 1984, Collette finds her life upended by the arrival of a gifted child from a troubled home, the return of a stalking presence from her past, and her own mysteriously growing hunger.